Traffic

Rating:
Summary: Valuable Film
Review: Character, decision-making, love, honor, deceit, trust....all are put into question in Traffic, a powerful and moving film.....to go along with the many beautiful and honest teachings of this movie, the structure of the film is captivating as well, with inter-related stories being told simultaneously....the performances are strong, the directing and storyline even stronger...traffic is an honorable mention in my book...it is worth seeing

Rating:
Summary: Unrealistic, Mediocre, and Boring
Review: A tediously long film that is nothing more than an overhyped docu-drama. There's nothing new in this movie that any moderately educated person wouldn't already know about the illegal drug market just by reading the paper or watching the news. Furthermore, after reading such articles or watching such documentaries, one will find this film to portray caricatures more than real characters in a stereotypical Hollywood fashion. The characters are as dull as their unimaginative script.

So, in the end one must ask: what's the point of this movie? It neither educates or entertains. Those two elements usually result in one conclusion: boredom. Over 2 hours of predictable snail-paced plots about things people have already seen on countless episodes of Miami Vice, Cops, and Law and Order, to name a few. This movie was made twenty years too late! As a matter of fact; since these problems were already manifest in the 60s, maybe it was made 40 years too late.

Save your money and time: rent it if you must. It may interest you if you have absolutely no understanding of drug related crimes or drug culture. As I've said though, any person with with a minimal education will find this movie to be a dull rehash of an old story.


Rating:
Summary: TOP 10 MOST BORING!
Review: If this bomb doesn't put you to sleep,
you're already dead! This is deffinitely
in my top 10, most boring movies ever!

Rating:
Summary: Couldn't get any better
Review: Traffic definitely showed the world what goes on behind the closed doors in drug traffiking and how people handle it on both sides of the borders. From one side, It's hard to win the war on drugs when you're the drug czar (Michael Douglas) and your loved ones (Erika Christensen) are doing what you're strongly against. From another side, you want to protect your family (Catherine Zeta-Jones) but you can't help but know that all your wealth and lifestyles for you and your family are coming from something illegal; something that you know your husband (Steven Bauer) is doing but you refuse to believe it. As for the other side of the border, what can you do when you're an honest mexican cop (Benicio Del Toro who was just amazing) who's caught between doing the right thing and doing the right thing for the wrong people.

Traffic really opened my eyes from how people operate when it comes to drugs. It shows how we deal with stopping it, abusing it, selling it, and eventually how it comes to our countries. All 3 stories don't make sense with each other but seem to come together in the middle while drifting apart towards the end of the film. Sure it's long (146 minutes) but how are you gonna fit all the details in the movie in just under 100 minutes? Great film and the best job Steven Soderbergh has ever done in his career.

Rating:
Summary: DYNAMITE PERFORMANCES ! ! ! ! !
Review: Truly one of the best films I've ever seen. Great performances and stories. Very intriging and suspenseful. Great actors such as MICHAEL DOUGLAS, CATHERINE ZETA JONES and DON CHEADLE. One of the best stories in the movie was with the teenager and his friend who later has O.D. Very intense and sad. If you like those kind of movies in which there are a lot of intense thematic problems and different stories, then this one is for you. I suggest you see this one immediatly.

Rating:
Summary: Fantastic ensemble acting
Review: Loved the camera techniques - from hand-held to longshots, the audience becomes completely involved in the characters' situations. This movie is one to focus on while watching - the dialogue is swift, and the spanish government/drug lords can get confusing. (Maybe I was just slow..) Benicio Del Toro, Don Cheadle, Topher Grace, Erika Christensen, and Michael Douglas were excellent.

Rating:
Summary: Not Much Movement
Review: Traffic is an average movie which does not inspire enough interest to get out of that pigeon hole. It deals with many stories and they are all related on some way, obviously the director was watching some foreign films, for this is nothing new. Most of the stories are preposterous, take for example the wife of a drug dealer, in a few weeks she is talking to dangerous drug leaders in Mexico as if she knew what she was doing. Also, the drug czar wandering around in the ghettos of Baltimore, these scenes do not add up and as a result the film is mostly a compendium of utter boredom that drags on.



Rating:
Summary: a fine Soderbergh masterpiece.
Review: This review is for the Criterion Collection DVD edition of the film.

Rejected by all the studios it went on to win many awards.
The film has multiple plots, one about the hew head of the ONDCP who discovers that his daughter is using drugs. There is also a plot about drug smuggling in Mexico, and one of a man who is accused of a major smuggling ring after being fingered by a competitor.

The film is also a critique on the US war on drugs, which is inarguably a controversal issue in politics. The film has an all-star cast with some big names. As it is a film about drugs, it depicts their use and the effects of use which many will find disturbing. The ambient music is very beautiful and the final piece, Brian Eno's "An Ending: Ascent" is one of my favorites.

The Criterion DVD also has many special features.

Disc one contains the film along with three audio commentaries. One with writer Stephen Gaghan and director Steven Soderbergh, another with music writer Cliff Martinez, and the final one with the producers.

Disc two contains the mother load!
24 deleted scenes and a gag, all with optional audio commentary by Soderbergh and Gaghan.

There is also a demonstration of film processing and dialogue editing used to acheive the grainy look of some scenes and a few removals of background noises respectively, There is over half an hour of raw footage edited into the film incuding a cocktail party scene with interviews of actual US politicians, the filming of a warehouse where the government stores drugs being used as evidence in trials, and scenes from the El Paso Intelligence Center (EPIC) and a slideshow drug tracker K9 dog trading cards.

If you like the regular version of the film, you'll love this one.

Rating:
Summary: Well Written, Well Argued...
Review: Well written, directed, and acted, Traffic makes the Case that we need to attack the demand side of the drug trade if we are going to win the war on drugs, b/c our current supply-side approach is futile.